Adapted from the novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The four March girls - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - and their neighbor Laurie learn all about love, loss, and life in this Civil War era coming-of-age story.
Overall, I think the first half of the story was adapted quite well. Granted, all the actresses were way too old to be playing the sisters at the beginning - 23-year-old Joan Bennett playing 12-year-old Amy was definitely a stretch - but I think it was better than changing actresses halfway through, and they all portrayed the individualized sisters from the book very well. While some of the details of the story were changed or simplified, for the most part the film still captures the essence of the book. My main objection to the first half of the film is that neither Laurie's character nor his relationship with the girls was developed nearly as well as it could have been, which led to several issues in the second half. Warning: 149-year-old spoilers ahead
In my opinion, this movie totally botched the Laurie storyline in the second half. I was okay with some of the cuts; the whole thing about Jo thinking Beth was in love with him was kind of weird and unnecessary, but it did give a good excuse for Jo to leave. In the movie she leaves after turning Laurie down, whereas in the book he doesn't declare his love until after she comes back, but these are relatively minor changes that still could have worked. The problem is the film doesn't show enough of Laurie's perspective after Jo rejects him. In the book, he pines and mopes around Europe until he meets up with Amy, who's basically like, "Dude, get over yourself, you can't just give up on life because Jo's not in love with you." And then he gets all mad and hurt and criticizes her for saying she's going to marry this random Fred guy (who was completely cut out of the movie) for money even though she doesn't love him, and storms off. But eventually they both realize the other is right and Laurie starts living wholeheartedly again and Amy turns down Fred, so when they meet up again they're already pretty far along the path of falling in love. Personally, I really enjoyed seeing this unfold in the book, so I was extremely disappointed that it was entirely eliminated from the movie. In the film, Jo gets upset about ruining her friendship with Laurie by refusing to marry him, but we don't actually see Laurie acting all that upset. It's mentioned that Laurie and Amy met up in Europe, we see Laurie comfort Amy after Beth's death, and the next thing you know, they're married. I understand that it's a long, complicated story and things needed to be simplified, but this felt entirely too rushed. Similarly, Jo's relationship with Bhaer turned romantic far more quickly in the movie than in the book, but that bothered me less than the Amy/Laurie thing.
It seems like this movie was intended to be a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, who was a promising new star at the time, but would soon come to be known as "box office poison." Legend has it that she was actually a bit of a tomboy in real life, so the part of Jo must have seemed perfect for her. This is yet another example of the first half of the film outdoing the second half: Hepburn does a great job of capturing the young Jo's exuberance and creativity and spunk, but sinks into melodrama when her character grows up. The way she looks at Bhaer in all of their scenes together is utterly ridiculous, especially since book Jo doesn't think of him romantically until much later. Even so, I found this performance as a whole immeasurably superior to her performance in Morning Glory, for which she won the 1932/1933 Best Actress Oscar. If she had to win an Oscar that year, it should probably have been for Little Women instead, but of course nobody asked me.
Despite my paragraph-long rant about how it could have been adapted better, I think this was a worthy adapted screenplay attempt. It's difficult to turn dense novels into 2-hour feature films, and I've definitely seen worse. I wasn't sorry for an excuse to finally read this book, since I've been meaning to for a while, especially after seeing Louisa May Alcott hilariously portrayed in Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party. There are several other film versions of Little Women, and now I'm curious about how they handled the Amy/Laurie thing, so I'll probably watch some of them soon too. But as far as this project goes, next on the itinerary is It Happened One Night - which also won both Best Actress and Best Picture, so I've blogged about it twice already, but oh well - based on the story "Night Bus" by Samuel Hopkins Adams.
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